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About twenty years ago, in a graduate English seminar at George Washington University, a presenter began her lecture on feminism with a series of questions: "Do you think women are equal to men?" "Do women deserve the same rights and opportunities as men?"
"Of course!" The class collectively responded.
"Congratulations," the presenter chimed, "you're all feminists!" We were disarmed by the simple illumination. Indeed we were all feminists.
For some, feminism can be a scary word. To some, it implies a violent rejection of traditional gender norms, even a hatred of men as a collective. These negative stereotypes applied to feminists have been nurtured over the decades by its opponents with defamatory, highly charged rhetoric. Zionism works the same way. For some it's a scary word, made scarier by the aggressive and deliberately misleading rhetoric of its many opponents. Although most people have at this point are familiar with the term, perhaps the average person doesn’t really know what it means.
"Do you believe that Jews are equal to other human beings?" "Are Jews deserving of self-determination on their ancestral Jewish homeland?"
If you answer yes, congratulations, you're a Zionist!
***
"Why do you care so much about Anti-Semitism?"
It's a question as good as any. A good friend asked recently. Why do you care so much?
I understand what he meant. After all, prejudice and racism are ever-present. Regrettably, there are too many forms of hate that can make ours an ugly world. If a person gets caught up with every racist, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, anti-Semite, etc. then that person is going to have a very unpleasant life. Why get so caught up in this one particular ancient form of bigotry?
I am a Jew. Being a Jew is the thing about myself of which I am most proud. But it expands beyond my personal identity. It extends to my parents, grandparents, and ancestors who have carried the weight of thousands of pogroms across thousands of miles over thousands of years. It extends to the entire nation of Israel–as in the entirety of the world's Jewry–who have borne the same.
Ask any Jew and no matter which part of the world they're from or their parents were from—Poland, Yemen, Argentina, Egypt, it doesn't matter—their stories are the same. They tried to destroy us and almost succeeded but somehow we survived. It's like the Jews have rendered our own variation on Tolstoy's line about families: all Jewish families have the same story arc—torqued sharply between unspeakable tragedy and the triumph of survival.
My story begins in another place also fighting for its very survival: Ukraine. Born in Kyiv in the early 80s, I grew up with my older brother and parents not far from Babi Yar, an urban ravine that had been converted into a park. It was not unusual to find me there on a summer afternoon, playing with my family and friends. My youthful bliss shielded my ignorance of what happened there just a little over forty years earlier—where einsatzgruppen death squads led the organized massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, over 33,000 in all, in one weekend. It was one of the largest single killing events the nazis carried out against the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.
Years later, during one of those times I came to visit the now park with my family, my father happened to stumble upon a human jawbone that had emerged from its deranged and dusty resting place. The encounter made more awkward as we were accompanied by an American Jewish volunteer from the organization HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, who, at great risk to his personal safety, had embarked upon a trip of solidarity behind the iron curtain to visit us in the Soviet Union.
It doesn’t escape me that from my very birth, before I even understood what a Jew is or even who I am, I’ve been part of a struggle against antisemitism. We were one of the lucky ones, Jewish refuseniks escaping the USSR in the late 80s not long after Chernobyl. Upon arrival in the United States, we were political refugees, stateless, sans passports.
***
Every Jewish person in the world felt the impact of October 7th and has been irretrievably changed by it. The pain and horror of those days are part of us now, urgently visceral. An awful weight cements in your guts as the casualty rates tick higher and higher; the footage coming out of Israel becoming more gruesome and unthinkable.
It only gets worse. Entire families wiped out, incinerated in their own homes. Rape, beheadings, torture, every form of sadism in the awful arsenal of terror. Hundreds of hostages snatched—women, children, elderly, Holocaust survivors. Holocaust survivors... for God's sake, have they not suffered enough? The misery punctuated by the veritable orgy of celebration over Jewish blood being spilled, while we hadn't even put out the flames from our loved ones' corpses. The taunting, the abuse, the humiliations, the mental contortions involved in justifying, explaining, 'contextualizing,' and generally, cheering on human debasement. I will never forget it. I will never accept it. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, for Hamas and their supporters in Gaza and around the world: the sadism is the message.
***
The creation of the state of Israel, of a historically oppressed and marginalized people establishing a state while resurrecting an ancient language, is the greatest story of decolonization in history. Jewish presence within the boundaries of the modern state of Israel goes back thousands of years—confirmed by archeological, historical, genealogical, religious, and literary ties. During the Jewish-Roman Wars in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the very name Palestine was intentionally chosen by the Romans to scrub the land of its Jewish roots and break the historical connections the Jews had to the land. After the final deciding battle, the Bar Kochba Revolt of 135 CE, the Jewish population of Judea was scattered throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Subsequently, for thousands of years the Jewish people toiled under the yoke of often violent oppression.
By the 19th century, after centuries of massacres and expulsion edicts, the majority of the world’s Jews found themselves concentrated in the Pale of Settlement, a large swath of eastern Europe then controlled by Imperial Russia where the Tsars had decreed Jews were allowed to live—with restrictions. Confined to small rural towns, or shtetls, they were forbidden from living or traveling outside these predetermined boundaries. Access to cities and urban life was restricted without special permission. But even here, in the shtetl, they were not safe from death and destruction: pogroms occurred in steady intervals, usually carried out by the Tsar’s Cossack agents but often complemented by the local population. My great-great grandfather, a rabbi, was a victim of one of these pogroms.
The 20th century saw the human catastrophe of the Holocaust befall the Jews. The unrestrained bestiality of what occurred was so unprecedented that a neologism became necessary: genocide. It was an emphatic culmination of persecution after centuries of death and destruction for the Jewish nation—serving as the most glaring example of why the Jewish people were determined to return to their ancestral homeland, and why that desire had never left them in the twenty centuries since their diaspora began. The aspiration of a people to live as their true selves in the land of their forefathers, this is Zionism.
Despite ardent claims to the contrary, Zionism is the antidote to genocide. Zionism represents the aspiration of every Jew to live in peace as a Jew without threat or danger. This is why anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism: because the absence of Israel means the Jewish nation will once again be vulnerable to the inevitable violent outbursts of the world’s anti-Jewish forces without any guarantees of protection.
***
Sadly, the absolute horror of 7 October was only the beginning. The paradigm of contemporary Jewish life in liberal democracies had been undone with a shocking immediacy. The Jewish people once again were forced to reevaluate and recalibrate our own place within the broader societies we inhabit. Anti-Israel, anti-Jewish protestors focused on targeting Jews in public spaces, college campuses, and anywhere Jews could be found as individually and collectively complicit in genocide. Wherever Jews congregated, in synagogues, in Jewish community centers, in their homes, on college campuses, they were met with harassment, intimidation, and humiliation. Reckless rhetoric being thrown about became the norm.
“Jews should go back to Europe where they came from!”
“Go back to Poland!”
I took those especially to heart because in my case that would mean my going back to Ukraine. A country that has been under illegal invasion and terrorist assault for the last three years and is now being sold down the river by the current US administration.
The silence from friends was shattering, no sympathies or inquires as to the safety of my family, as they did overwhelmingly when Russia invaded Ukraine. Which is ok, I did not expect them. But I also did not expect the messages I ultimately did receive, demanding to know where my humanity had gone—simply for expressing my support for my family in Israel. My only conclusion from this line of questioning is that Jews, in the minds of those asking, are not part of humanity.
Beyond personal betrayal, the intellectual betrayal also took me aback. So many liberal and progressive institutions, and the people within them, purport to stand for progressive, democratic values. But to anti-Jewish advocates, none of their exalted progressive values apply to Jews. Jews are not deserving of even basic respect unless they debase themselves by repeating anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slander. Harassing, threatening, and outright discriminating against Jews and Jewish interests became normalized. Murder, rape, and looting on a mass scale were condoned, even celebrated, as legitimate forms of resistance. But what kind of oppression can possibly justify murder and rape as a legitimate form of resistance against it?
Apparently, for the likes of Judith Butler, Russell Rickford, and other alt-left activists on college campuses and elsewhere, the kind where Jews are the victims. When Jews are the targets suddenly it’s time for armed revolution. Not when Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. Not when China practically enslaves millions of Uyghur Muslims in an actual open-air prison. Not when during the Syrian Civil War not a single Arab or Muslim country offered to take a single Syrian refugee, let alone a Palestinian one. No, it’s when Israel responds to the most insanely brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust that the left-wing faculty and student body suddenly feel compelled for armed resistance, by any means necessary.
The betraying silence from Academia, Women's and Human Rights organizations, and the progressive left, of whom up until that very moment I had considered myself a member, as they instead chose to condone, contextualize, and even celebrate Jewish death and rape has been nauseating. The radical left-wing politics of academia have veered so far off course they've horseshoed into right-wing islamofascist anti-Semitism. Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral on Tik-Tok when the misguided alt-left youth stumbled upon the 9/11 mastermind’s manifesto and agreed with him. The mental gymnastics necessary for a feminist or a queer theorist to justify Islamist terrorists torturing and raping women…
In the fever to stand up for Palestine, rape denialism became a mainstream position of progressive figures. Living in the wake of #MeToo, we were implored to believe all women. But strangely that didn't extend to the Israeli women and girls brutalized on 7 October. Instead, those that managed to survive, and even the hostages after being rescued, were forced to submit to the same kind of shameful public interrogation—and disbelief—that had initiated the outrage that led to the #MeToo movement in the first place! Believe all women!...unless they're Israeli. #MeToo!...unless you’re a Jew.
It was bad enough to see throngs of students cosplaying hamas terrorists throughout college campuses, but I thought it was misguided youth who had been led astray by misapplication of liberal concepts. It wasn’t until the college presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified before congress that I fully grasped the rot was flowing from on high. For not a single Ivy League President to be able to bring herself to condemn a call to genocide, Jews or no Jews, seems to me an indicator of a complete breakdown in the academic model. If we’ve become so tolerant that we tolerate intolerance, if we claim to venerate free speech but impose conditions on that free speech and then in turn cynically violate our own standards, if we condemn hate speech with one breath and in the next are shouting anti-Semitic terrorist chants, then I fear all the legitimate work being done in the universities in good faith will be tainted by such hypocrisy. Trump’s attack on the universities, using these factors as a pretext to defund higher education is evidence of how quickly and effectively that delegitimization can be put into effect.
Chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” sounds like a fun way to protest Israel’s alleged crimes, except for Jews it’s equivalent to a klansman shouting “white power!” while doing a seig heil. Maybe worse. In the original Arabic, instead of "Palestine will be free" the second part of the slogan is “Palestine will be Arabic.” If Palestine is Arabic and there’s no Israel, what has happened to the Jews in this scenario? Driven into the sea, naturally, through “Intifada revolution.” Like suicide bombings, the chant has been hamas’ calling card for decades. The absurdity belies its subhuman brutality. Then again, much like the the GoPros hamas terrorists wore during their raping and pillaging to preserve their ‘glorious triumphs’ for posterity, the brutality is the point. The sadism is the message.
When racist critics claim Jews aren’t indigenous to the Middle East because some of them are white, it’s a deliberate inversion of and allusion to the primary accusation leveled against Jews by Nazis—that they weren’t “pure”, had been “defiling” the Aryan race, and therefore deserving of a ‘final solution.’ The idiocy of this disgraceful line of anti-Semitic criticism is compounded by the willful blindness to the fact that many Palestinians are just as white as the whitest Israelis. Gal Gadot is ‘too white’ to be native to the Middle East, but Gigi Hadid isn’t? Twisted logic that would be humorous if it weren’t so pervasive and hateful.
Yes, it’s true Trump’s unholy attack on the universities and foreign students are immoral and illegal, and he’s using stamping out anti-Semitism as the pretext. But the blatant hypocrisy exposed in left wing circles when free speech was never as free or as sacred as when it was Jewish hate speech is precisely the ammunition Trump is now using in his assault. Through a progressive lens, chanting hamas slogans to destroy Israel and Jews (or Zionists, which they use interchangeably to shield themselves from accusations of anti-Semitism), literally calling for their genocide, is protected speech that mustn’t be silenced. When faced with consequences—like expulsion from school or job loss—they lament about the loss of free speech and intellectual freedom, principles they themselves do not support. If the cause is indeed righteous and true, shouldn’t it be able to stand up to even the softest of scrutiny? Isn’t censorship the very thing universities are supposed to rage against?
By embracing the most extreme radical positions, by engaging in the most inflammatory and confrontational tactics imaginable, the protestors precluded any chance of effecting change on the ground in Washington, Jerusalem, Gaza, or the West Bank. I couldn’t grasp why until it snapped into focus: the anti-Jewish bigotry was the whole point. Making Jews quake with fear, making them hide their Judaism, making them ashamed of who they are. Ashamed of supporting Israel. That’s the whole bloody point. It’s about putting Jews in their place, to return them to the twenty centuries when they were helpless to defend themselves and powerless to change their circumstances. The sadism is the message.
